The good folk over at Kemistry Gallery have another great exhibition opening today, a selection of German designer Hans Hillman's film posters. This is the first time any of the late Hillman's posters have been shown in the UK and well worth swinging by for a nosey if you're in Shoreditch.

I went to watch Finding Vivian Maier last night. It's a documentary telling the story of the discovery of the work of the New York born street photographer, and tries to piece together her story through interviews with those who crossed paths with her during her life.

For those unfamiliar with her story, Maier worked as a nanny throughout her life and, although she always carried a camera with her, no one had any idea that she had created this amazing body of work. It was only after her death, when someone bought a box of her negatives at auction without really knowing what it was, did it start to emerge.

It's not just the mystery of that story and her life, the fact is that her work is absolutely stunning. For me, even though only a portion of her work is currently accessible, it's already clear that she needs to be considered amongst the greatest street photographers, alongside people like Helen Levitt and Robert Frank.

If you get chance, watch the film, and certainly look up her work if you haven't come across it before. It is a rare and amazing thing to witness a great artistic talent being discovered in your time. It's a real shame that she wasn't recognised during her own lifetime, although the people who knew her seem to think she wouldn't have enjoyed it.

There is a prevailing school of thought in the advertising business that to change consumer behaviour (and by consumer behaviour we mean getting people to buy stuff), you first need to change consumer attitudes.

This is, frankly, baloney.

In reality, their own usage and consumption are the things that ultimately drive and shape somebody’s attitude to your brand.

People know much more about brands that they buy and use frequently.

Hence, attitudes and brand beliefs tend to reflect people’s behavioural loyalty and purchasing patterns, rather than operating as the things that stimulate that purchasing behaviour.

It’s a classic case of confusing cause with effect.
It’s not “I buy it because I like the brand”.
More “I like the brand because I buy it”.

Unlike the chicken and egg, we know what came first.

And it wasn’t a change in attitudes.

It’s this mistake that’s leading agencies to produce advertising that treats consumers as mouth-breathing morons who are bereft of any logic and reason when it comes to making choices about brands.

That can’t be a good thing, can it?

But this belief that you must create an emotional bond with the consumer to get them to love your brand or connect with you before they will consider buying your products seems to be treated like gospel.

The idea that you need to change the audience’s attitude before you can move them closer to buying a product seems to be treated like some kind of immutable law.

Why is this?

Well, for one thing, this kind of advertising is in fashion right now and appears to be the only kind of advertising that most agencies want to make.

They cherry-pick findings from the world of behavioural science and cognitive psychology that suit their views, to justify their approach.

This usually ends up in fluffy, happy-clappy advertising that is desperate to own some kind of emotional territory.

This kind of advertising is the result of agencies’ over-riding obsession with using advertising to generate brand love to create a connection with an audience, rather than using it to focus on why the product might actually be of help, use or value to the consumer.The insanity loop
And therein lies the problem.

Most agencies have forgotten what the point of advertising is.

Selling is now a dirty word in Adland.

But we think, if you’re not using advertising to give more people a reason to buy your product more often, then you’re not using your advertising effectively.

Despite this seeming like incontestable and uncontroversial common sense, this point of view is regarded as heresy by many.

The insanity loop continues as agencies continue to exclusively focus on what can they say about a brand to get people to like it rather than asking what can they say about a product to get people to buy it.

And so out come the kittens to attempt to manipulate the emotions of the consumer – who supposedly lack the intelligence and free will to make any kind of purchasing decision based on reasoning or logic.

There used to be a deal with consumers.
We knew we were using advertising to sell something.
They knew we were using advertising to sell something.

They were prepared to give us their precious time and attention, and maybe would even be persuaded to buy that something, if we entertained them with our message.

The product would feature at the heart of this message and show in some way how it might help them, or how they might benefit from having it in their life in some small way.

There was honesty, truth, integrity and transparency in this deal.

Everyone knew where they stood.

Nobody was hiding anything.

Now it seems that this deal no longer stands.

In fact, it’s de rigueur to not even bother featuring the product in a commercial at all.

It seems a logo bolted on to the end of some disingenuous, generic piece of film that could be for anything will suffice, thank you very much.Bloody difficult

The post-rationalisation going on from Kahneman’s System Thinking – that mistakenly assumes there is no place for rational or conscious decision-making – is turning advertising into an industry of confidence tricksters.

Despite the proclamations of companies being organised to be customer-centric, nobody seems to be asking what that customer might actually want from advertising, or how it might actually help them.

It’s hardly surprising that we find ourselves in a situation where trust is eroded between advertisers and consumers, as well as between clients and agencies.

The tenure of the average client-agency relationship has shrunk to just under three years (IPA2013).

Is it really any wonder when agencies steadfastly refuse to embrace the fact that they are actually in the business of selling?

Agencies have become a safe haven for pseudo-scientists, cod psychologists and wannabe sociologists.

People who seem more interested in intellectualising problems than moving their clients’ sales charts in an upwards direction.

It’s all too easy to be swept along by the allure of producing the kind of advertising that springs from the objective of changing attitudes and owning emotions.

For a start, it’s much easier to produce than compelling advertising that’s actually true to the product.

It’s “just add water” creative development.

Get yourself a thesaurus, scour the zeigeist for a cultural trend, stroke your chin and think deeply about some inner-directed values that your audience would aspire to, and bingo – you’ll have a list of relatively meaningless adjectives to write ads about.

Agencies will claim that advertising an attitude or an emotion that your brand can own is essential to help differentiation.

“All products are the same, we live in a parity world” so their argument goes.

Their party line is that it’s the emotional battleground where brands fight it all out – it’s what people feel that’s all-important, not what they think.

And so we are in an age where companies spend millions of pounds just broadcasting brand positionings in the vain hope that their target audience will identify and connect with them.

But this obsession with chasing some kind of brand love is rarely reciprocated from a consumer perspective.

Normal people just don’t care about brands anywherenearas much as people who work in advertising agencies and marketing departments.

And anyway, it’s bloody difficult for them to ‘love’ a brand they haven’t actually consumed.

(And it’s also eminently possible, and not uncommon, to buy a product without even ‘liking’ the brand.)

In Professor Byron Sharp’s book How Brands Grow, he demonstrates that most brand attitudes are very weak and rarely recalled.

From extensive research he concludes that the influence of attitudes on behaviour is negligible, while the influence of behaviour on attitude is very strong.

Sharp found that when asking regular brand buyers about their feelings towards a brand only 10% see it as different or unique.

So, even people who purchase and use a brand regularly don’t see it as a loving relationship.

Most buying decisions are made from what is a relatively narrow consideration set for any category.

In Sharp’s view, the real battle of brands is not differentiation, it is to get into this consideration set by making advertising that is distinctive and consistent.

You have an advantage

What does this all mean to you, the advertiser?

It means that the best use of your advertising is to get people to change their behaviour, rather than attempt to change their attitude.

And that means advertising that gets people to buy your product, rather than advertising intended to make them think or feel something about your brand.

Now, many agencies have taken this to mean that all they have to do is make advertising that is distinctive, so that the brand will be in the mind of the consumer.

And you know what – that is better than nothing.

However, we believe that the best, and most successful advertising goes a step further.

That to be really successful, advertising should be distinctive and memorable, so the brand is in the mind of the consumer, but is remembered for the right reasons.

So that people associate the product with qualities that are important to that product or category.
We don’t just make sure you’re in the mind of the consumer.

We also give them a reason to select your product.

So that when it’s time for them to buy, you aren’t just in their consideration set, you have an advantage.

That’s why Fentimans drinks aren’t just becoming more well-known, they are well-known for having a distinctive hit of flavour that ordinary soft drinks lack.

And why Drambuie isn’t just making a comeback as a credible and desirable drink to choose – bartenders and customers also understand that it offers an extraordinary depth of taste.

This is advertising that recognises that consumers are not as controlled and dominated by their emotions as agencies like to think.

A model that credits consumers with intelligence and understands that they do make rational decisions, and smart choices – much more than they’re given credit for by advertising agencies.

And this advertising does work to help stimulate sales, we have seen the evidence ourselves through results on our own clients.

It’s very dangerous to assume that there are laws of advertising that apply to everything.

But it’s even more dangerous to buy into the assumption that advertising should work to change attitudes first rather than work to change behaviour.

Pursue that assumption at your peril.

If you’re worried that your advertising might have an attitude problem, or you feel you have good products that your advertising just isn’t doing justice to, why not get in touch with us at Sell! Sell! for a chat.

We’ll always make time to properly understand your challenges and ambitions to see if we might be able to help.

If you haven't already, get your reading gear around this excellent article by Professor Byron Sharp. We have a lot of time for Sharp here at Sell! Towers, his work has encouraged us to not feel like we're loonies howling at the moon.

In this article he (rightly in our opinion) lays into the current fashion for advertising people to take the flimsy theories of neuroscientists and use them to post-rationalise their own similarly flimsy approach to advertising.

A couple of excerpts:

"Neuroscience is fashionably dragged in as support: ‘Oh, look, this part of the brain lights up when people see a brand they know well and buy – this proves that brand preference is due to brands forging strong subconscious emotional bonds.’
This is a gigantic leap of logic! It is worth noting that no serious neuroscientist has made such a claim, nor been willing to support such a claim. More realistically, familiar things are familiar, and familiarity is important. We don’t need to layer on more fanciful theory."

"...what really worries me is that this infatuation with theatrical psychology lab experiments – that show participants in lab experiments can be nudged without knowing it – is bringing back a discredited theory of brand image of besotted/manipulated consumers."

"These psychology lab studies produce highly fragile results (see chronicle.com/ article/Power-of-Suggestion/136907). If you try to replicate the experiment you are unlikely to get the same finding. Now, it’s impossible to perfectly replicate any experiment (you’ll be in a different time to start with, with different researchers, respondents and so on) and these lab results are affected by even tiny changes. They are the ‘delicate flowers’, the ‘show ponies’ of the research world. Outside the lab, out in the real world, these (always surprising) results seldom, if ever, occur and when they do they are usually far, far weaker."

I've had the conversation with a few different people about businesses paying their rightful tax.

This subject is interesting to me because we're small business and we meet our tax commitments without attempting to reduce that commitment through loopholes or other means, whereas, as we continually hear, many large companies use obtuse structures and tactics to significantly reduce what they need to pay.

I don't think that's right. I think companies operate within society, and only succeed because society works, and so the company owe the society in which they operate and make profit, and should pay their share back into it, to help keep it working.

But some people, in defence of the actions of those companies, say to me that it's up to the government to close the loopholes and, as long as the company isn't actually breaking the law, they should take advantage of any opportunity.

And that is a fair challenge I think. But I'm not sure I agree.

To stop companies doing that kind of thing requires specific laws to be set to rule out the practices which make it possible. That's time consuming and by its nature is reactionary. By the time the laws have been passed, more than likely the clever people who help companies lower their tax burden will have found clever new ways to do so that don't fall foul of the new legislation.

So I wonder whether companies should act like a part of our society by choice. Shouldn't they operate with a conscience?

Conscience is loosely defined as a moral sense of right and wrong, viewed as acting as a guide to one’s behaviour.
As individuals, we are expected to behave morally and with a conscience. So why not business?

The argument against seems to be that business only has a responsibility to it's shareholders and to making profit. But is that right? A business isn't a person, but it is created by people and run by people. Should it not be expected to have the same responsibilities as a person?

At the moment it seems that people can start companies, and run them, but once it up and running, the company is an entity that is not judged by the same values that a person would be.

What do you think, dear reader, should business have a conscience – or is that just idealistic, hippy nonsense?

In 1995, U.K.-based artist William Utermohlen was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This is a difficult diagnosis and disease for anyone, but before his death in 2007, Utermohlen created a heart-wrenching final series of self-portraits over a roughly 5-year period documenting the gradual decay of his mind due to this crippling disease.“In these pictures we see with heart-breaking intensity William’s efforts to explain his altered self, his fears and his sadness.” - an extract from an accompanying essay by the artists widow Patricia.(source: http://www.boredpanda.com)

I drink whisk(e)y, and sometimes I will treat myself to an expensive whisk(e)y. So why do Johnnie Walker, who make whisky, some of it expensive, think that I'm a twat? That's the only explanation I can think of as to why they think this would get me to buy their expensive whisky.

Following up on yesterdays post, I found an interview with Joy Howard - VP of Marketing at Patagonia - in Ad Age from December 2013."The best way to get people's attention is to be useful and show useful information that enhances people's lives but also shows real news,"Amen Joy.